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Waiting for the Biblioburro // Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia

In Colombia, internal conflict between
paramilitaries and guerrilla groups ebbs and flows, exacerbated by political
upheaval and the drug trade. In the north of Colombia, in a rural area
controlled mainly by paramilitaries, and still under threat of violence and
repression, a former schoolteacher has outfitted his burros as a mobile lending
library. For ten years, Luis Humberto Soriano Bohórquez has gone from village
to village reading to children, helping them with their homework, and lending
books to anyone within burro distance. He and his wife have also built a
library that serves more than 250 children in the area.

In the course of his travels he has been
threatened with violence, has been robbed, and was injured in a fall from his
burro. Despite these obstacles, he continues to promote literacy because he
believes that it is key to ending violence and bringing peace to his country.
Soriano’s courageous work is the inspiration for two recent children’s picture
books, both published in English in the US. Waiting for the Biblioburro tells
the story through the eyes of a little girl named Ana, whose town receives a
visit from the biblioburro. Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia follows
Soriano through a day of trekking into the countryside and back with his
library. Both books simplify Soriano’s life and mission, as one would expect,
but a closer examination of each text shows the troubling degree to which
essential details have been purged and sanitized for a US audience.

author: Monica Brown

illustrator: John Parra

Tricycle Press, 2011

grades 2-4

Colombian

Ana, the protagonist of Waiting for
the Biblioburro, lives in a remote farming town. A long-gone schoolteacher
once gave her a book, which she treasures, but she craves more stories. One
day, a man comes through town with books loaded on his burros. He reads stories
to the children and lends books to all. Ana loves having more stories to read
and tell to her brother. While waiting for the librarian to return, she makes a
book that tells the story of the man with the biblioburros. She presents him
with her book on his return, and he adds it to his library to share with
children in another town.

Brown’s
book is striking in its omissions. Not only is Soriano never named, but the
story is never located in a town or even a country. The only mention of Soriano
and Colombia is in the author’s note at the end of the book, easily overlooked.
The lack of concrete place names mirrors the lack of proper names throughout
the book; the only named characters are Ana and the two burros, Alfa and Beto.
This lends the entire story a dreamlike quality that is encouraged by John
Parra’s illustrations. Removing Soriano’s name and intent creates a
child-centered narrative that emphasizes personal charity over collective liberation,
and ignores the lived political realities of the Colombian people in favor of a
wish-fulfillment story that centers a child’s concerns so completely as to
eclipse any other perspective.

author: Jeanette Winter

illustrator: Jeanette Winter

Simon & Schuster / Beach Lane Books,
2011

preschool-grade 1

Colombian

Biblioburro: A True Story from Colombia takes a slightly more
accurate approach to the story of Soriano, according him a first name and the
story a location. The story introduces Luis, who likes to read. He acquires too
many books, and his wife, Diana, complains. He gets the idea to share his books
with children, and loads up his burros with books. On his way to a village, he
meets a bandit, who steals one of his books. He reaches the village and reads a
book about pigs to the children, then returns home to eat dinner and read late
into the night.

The book matter-of-factly depicts the
amount of work and danger that the bibliotecario faces each day that he sets
out on his rounds, rather than presenting him as a Johnny Appleseed-style
figure that simply appears when he is most needed. However, it still leaves out
the wider political context, recasting a real-life incident in which Soriano
was accosted by a group of paramilitaries as an encounter with a single
“bandit.” The book has other significant missteps as well. Winter’s
illustrations, while beautiful, present Colombia as a cartoon jungle full of
oversized animals and few, if any, houses, contributing to the US stereotype of
foreign countries (especially those in the Global South) as exotic and
backwards.

Winter also decides to portray Diana,
Soriano’s wife, as a shrew and a drudge. In the book, Diana’s irritation at the
growing piles of books induces Soriano to think of the biblioburro. She packs
his books onto the burros and, when he returns, cooks him dinner. The few
actions allow her make her seem entirely adjunct to her husband. In reality,
Diana also helped to build the library, making it unlikely that she would
berate her husband for collecting books. In addition, the couple runs a small
restaurant to make their living, which means that she would have little time to
assist him in his daily routine.

Both books manifestly underestimate
children’s ability to accept what is real. Children encounter trauma, poverty,
and loss every day, and see it in the lives of others. There is no reason to
traumatize children though their reading, but going to the opposite extreme,
removing any signs of struggle from their books, defeats the purpose of telling
real stories at all. By the same token, allowing exoticization and stereotyping
of other people and countries also serves to diminish the benefit of telling
children stories of courage and change. Let us write and buy children's books
that respect both the subjects of the stories and the children we are hoping to
enrich. Neither Waiting for the Biblioburro nor Biblioburro: A True
Story from Colombia is recommended.

For teachers who are moved by the story
of Soriano and his family and want to introduce them to their students,
consider resources that contextualize the situation in Colombia with more depth
and dimension. For example, the website supporting the PBS Point of View
documentary “Biblioburro: The Donkey Library” (www.pbs.org/pov/biblioburro/)
has a wealth of resources including clips from the film, video news updates
from Soriano, and straightforward information about the political and economic
violence in Colombia. It also includes interactive maps providing information
about literacy rates worldwide as well as videos of mobile libraries in Africa,
North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe.

—Katie Seitz

(published 4/9/13)

This
review, in a slightly different form, was originally posted at Teaching for Change
(http:bbpbooks.teachingforchange.org/blog). We thank the author and Teaching
for Change for permission.

1 comment:

Thank you for your comment about place-based stories in reviewing Waiting for the Biblioburro. I read the book carefully and thought it seemed like a good story of a real person; am grateful for the additional context and observations.